The Selfish Gene

Dawkins argues that natural selection operates on genes rather than on individuals or groups, and that organisms are best understood as vehicles built by genes to make copies of themselves. The book synthesises work by Hamilton on kin selection, Trivers on reciprocal altruism and parental investment, and Maynard Smith on evolutionarily stable strategies, and presents it for a general reader.

The gene-centred view explains behaviour that individual-level selection cannot. Altruism toward relatives follows from shared genes, weighted by relatedness, which is Hamilton's rule. Reciprocal altruism between unrelated individuals is stable where interactions repeat. Dawkins also uses game theory extensively, showing how populations settle into stable mixes of strategies such as hawk and dove, and why a strategy cannot be evaluated except against the population it faces.

The final chapter introduces the meme as a unit of cultural transmission subject to the same selection logic as genes, which is where the word came from. Later editions add two chapters, including one developing the extended phenotype, the argument that a gene's effects extend beyond the organism's body into structures and other organisms' behaviour.

The title has caused forty years of misreading. Dawkins does not claim that people are selfish or that selfishness is natural, and he says explicitly that humans can rebel against gene interests. Group selection advocates, including David Sloan Wilson, continue to dispute the framework, and multilevel selection has regained support. The meme concept has produced little research. The core argument remains standard in evolutionary biology, and for business readers its value is in showing how apparently altruistic behaviour follows from replicator interests.